1,927 research outputs found
University bulletin 2023-2024
This catalog for the University of South Carolina at Beaufort lists information about the college, the academic calendar, admission policies, degree programs, faculty and course descriptions
Early evaluation of the Children and Young People's Mental Health Trailblazer programme:a rapid mixed-methods study
BACKGROUND: The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Trailblazer programme is funding the creation of new mental health support teams to work in schools and further education colleges. Mental health support teams directly support children and young people with ‘mild to moderate’ mental health problems and work with school and college staff to promote well-being for all. A new workforce of education mental health practitioners is being trained for the teams. OBJECTIVE(S): The National Institute for Health and Care Research Birmingham, RAND and Cambridge Evaluation Rapid Evaluation Centre and Policy Innovation and Evaluation Research Unit undertook an early evaluation of the Trailblazer programme to examine the development, implementation and early progress of mental health support teams in the programme’s first 25 ‘Trailblazer’ sites. DESIGN: A mixed-methods evaluation, comprising three work packages: 1. Establishing the baseline and understanding the development and early impacts of the Trailblazer sites, including two rounds of surveys with key informants and participating education settings in all 25 sites. 2. More detailed research in five purposively selected Trailblazer sites, including interviews with a range of stakeholders and focus groups with children and young people. 3. Scoping and developing options for a longer-term assessment of the programme’s outcomes and impacts. Fieldwork was undertaken between November 2020 and February 2022. The University of Birmingham Institute for Mental Health Youth Advisory Group was involved throughout the study, including co-producing the focus groups with children and young people. RESULTS: Substantial progress had been made implementing the programme, in challenging circumstances, and there was optimism about what it had the potential to achieve. The education mental health practitioner role had proven popular, but sites reported challenges in retaining education mental health practitioners, and turnover left mental health support teams short-staffed and needing to re-recruit. Education settings welcomed additional mental health support and reported positive early outcomes, including staff feeling more confident and having faster access to advice about mental health issues. At the same time, there were concerns about children who had mental health problems that were more serious than ‘mild to moderate’ but not serious enough to be accepted for specialist help, and that the interventions offered were not working well for some young people. Mental health support teams were generally spending more time supporting children with mental health problems than working with education settings to develop ‘whole school’ approaches to mental health and well-being, and service models in some sites appeared to be more clinically oriented, with a strong focus on mental health support teams’ therapeutic functions. LIMITATIONS: Despite efforts to maximise participation, survey response rates were relatively low and some groups were less well represented than others. We were not able to gather sufficiently detailed data to develop a typology of Trailblazer sites, as was planned. CONCLUSIONS: Key lessons for future programme implementation include: - Whether mental health support teams should expand support to children and young people with more complex and serious mental health problems. - How to keep the twin aims of prevention and early intervention in balance. - How to retain education mental health practitioners once trained. FUTURE WORK: The findings have important implications for the design of a longer-term impact evaluation of the programme, which is due to commence in summer 2023
Disabilities in higher education: The impact of the disability resource center at Mississippi State University
Given the significance of completing college, the low college graduation rate for students with disabilities, and the effect of support services on students in the general population\u27s ability to complete college, it is essential to understand the link between accessing support and attaining positive postsecondary education outcomes for the wide-ranging population of college students with disabilities. Students with disabilities attend postsecondary education more significantly than ever before, and the literature shows they do not perform as well academically as their peers. Higher education institutes expect students with disabilities to perform academically at the same levels as their non-disabled peers. Therefore, institutions must identify and support them. With graduation completion rates deteriorating throughout higher education, administrators, faculty, and staff are more pressured than ever to meet all students\u27 needs. In response, higher education institutions are developing and restructuring their support services to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Through this study the researcher sought to compare the perceptions of students with disabilities who chose to register with the university’s disability resource center and utilize the accommodations and services they provide and the students who disabilities who chose not to register for these services. A quantitative study was performed using the National Survey of Student Engagement 2021-2022 to identify first year and senior students with disabilities. Multiple choice questions from the survey were analyzed to address each research question. The study compared the students identifying as having a disability and their registration status with the university’s disability resource office. The data from this study provided insight into the perceptions of students with disabilities, and how they feel about MSU’s DRC and utilizing its services and accommodations. Data also provided a comparison of students with disabilities who chose to register with DRC and those who did not in active learning, collaboration with peers, collaborative strategies with faculty, and the facilitation of the students social and emotional well-being and a supportive academic environment on campus by faculty
A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Lens to Logic Model Design
Culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) is an approach that centers all evaluation processes around the culture of a program’s secondary stakeholders. Specifically, this entails ensuring shared meanings in a group through communication. However, minimal connections have been made between CRE and logic model designs. Logic models commonly used by evaluators are data visualization and communication tools designed to aid in effectively communicating a program’s theory. Nevertheless, little is understood about the role culture plays in this process. This multiphase mixed methods study explored the integration of CRE to logic model designs using individualism and collectivism (IC) as a construct for culture and as a basis for tailoring the designs. Specifically, Phase 1 utilized an exploratory sequential design to develop the Logic Model Knowledge Test (LMKT) based upon expert evaluation insight and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). This addressed how learning from a logic model can be assessed. The LMKT was designed to assess the understanding of logic model components and the content of the program theory. It yielded good validity and reliability and was used in the final phase of the study. Phase 2 used a quantitative two-group comparison design to answer the question, which measures of IC would be more likely to help inform how people interpret logic models differently? Of three existing measures, Wagner (1995) was identified as a highly reliable measure that better distinguished IC-oriented people. Accordingly, it was used in the final phase of the study. Lastly, Phase 3’s mixed methods experimental design utilizing the LMKT and Wagner’s (1995) IC measure was implemented to help answer six questions regarding whether culturally tailored language, visualizations, or both impacted participants’ visual efficiency (VE) and perceived credibility of the program (CP). The findings suggest collectivistic MTurk participants had higher VE across seven culturally tailored logic model conditions. Collectivistic-oriented participants could better quickly and accurately answer the LMKT questions with less mental effort across all logic model conditions than individualistic-oriented participants. Yet, these conditions did not impact IC MTurk participants’ CP. Participants rated the program theory as credible across the logic model conditions regardless of their IC orientation. The findings provided partial empirical support for integrating CRE in logic model designs. Moreover, they added to the validity of the IC construct and Wagner’s (1995) measure. The findings also had valuable implications for evaluation practice through measures that could be used to better understand stakeholder cultural values aligned with communication styles and their knowledge of logic models. Finally, these same tools could be used for future research on evaluation concerning CRE and logic model designs
Exhibiting the Past
With respect to public issues, history matters. With the worldwide interest for historical issues related with gender, religion, race, nation, and identity, public history is becoming the strongest branch of academic history. This volume brings together the contributions from historians of education about their engagement with public history, ranging from musealisation and alternative ways of exhibiting to new ways of storytelling
Parading through a Circular Area Development with Arts and Sciences
In recent years, there has been increased attention toward art-science collaborations. Such collaborations encompass a broad spectrum of activities, ranging from artistic projects informed by technology and scientific research and vice versa, to novel forms of inquiry and communication at the intersection of the arts and sciences, combining diverse forms of knowledge and imagination. While such collaborations are not necessarily new, their recent manifestations allow us to gain insights into how complex societal challenges might be approached through multi-actor and disciplinary partnershi
Educating Spanish speaking immigrant children: a case study to investigate the experience of Spanish multilingual learners enrolled in one urban school in Boston
This single case study explores education of multilingual learners (MLs) from Hispanic backgrounds in an urban inner city school. Using a single case study to answer the research questions was ideal because it allowed the researcher to investigate the school through an objective lens (Gomm, Hammersley, Martyn, & Foster, 2000). The main purpose of the study is to investigate the systems in place in a public school that prevent those students to reach their potential. Several factors have influenced this enlarging academic and achievement gap. Even though, Hispanic community making-up to 16.7% of the entire U.S. population and being the largest and fastest-growing minority group, reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2011). Educating Hispanic children continues being a challenge. (Liu, C.-Y. A., & Liu, W.-H, 2012). However, with a growing number of Hispanic students in the US schools, it is imperative to improve their education and minimize those barriers. Using a single case study, this qualitative research focused on a single school in Boston where students Hispanic MLs students represents more than 50% of the schools’ population. The researcher visited classrooms and interviewed teachers to collect qualitative data. This information was later coded in themes to find trends and patterns affecting education of MLs. The researcher found that despite existence of several positive systems in place in the classrooms, such as knowledgeable teachers delivering sounds lessons, and strong systems to address family engagement, other factors are preventing students’ success. In effect, the results concluded existence of several opportunities to improve MLs education including changing language programs models and adding resources to be intentional in addressing MLs linguistic and academic needs
Digital Decisions and Online Heritage: an Examination of the Response of the GLAM Sector to the Opportunities of the Internet Since 2000
The digitisation of a critical mass of heritage collections has been an aspiration for successive UK governments and the heritage sector since the year 2000, with the stated aim of reaching new unserved audiences and thereby democratising heritage. But analysis shows that only an estimated 8.5% of the UK’s collections have been digitised and shared with the public. This research argues that there is a gap between what the UK Government believes is the purpose and value of digitisation and that expressed within the heritage discourse, and that this has been a barrier to digitisation. It examines predictions made during the years 1997-2003, a time when digitisation was being widely debated, and identifies three themes: Digital death and Obsolescence (fears linked to the speed of technological change), Ownership and the Public/Private web (the benefits and threats of sharing collections online) and Authority and Democratisation (the sharing of the curatorial role with visitors and the notion that digitisation can democratise heritage). Interviews with digital heritage professionals reveal they believe cost, time and copyright concerns to have been the main barriers to digitisation. I show that these practical challenges have been exacerbated by external pressures: technological, economic and social but predominantly political. The 2018 DCMS Culture is Digital report identifies the main barrier as a lack of digital maturity, but I argue this could equally be described as a lack of business maturity. I conclude that mass digitisation is unlikely to be a priority for heritage unless it can be successfully monetised, but that the Covid-19 crisis has created a new focus on this. I recommend that heritage organisations should take the lead from commercially successful museums like the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, which has successfully digitised almost its entire collection and shared it with no restrictions. I recommend that if the government wants to professionalise the sector, it needs to give British heritage organisations the same creative and financial freedom the Rijksmuseum has enjoyed. For UK heritage organisations, I recommend that a culture of open sharing might prove to be the key to democratising heritage, while at the same time helping them to discover the value and purpose of digitisation
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